Chaos in Ferguson Is Fueled by Tangle of Leadership

FERGUSON, Mo. — James Knowles III, the mayor of this beleaguered city, says he has watched in frustration as local, county and state officials have sent opposing signals, changed course and, at times, failed to talk to one another — what has been viewed as a collective failure of leadership from his office on up.

In the chaotic days after an unarmed black teenager was shot by a white Ferguson police officer, Mr. Knowles said he never got a call from the county executive or the governor. He said he had to find a phone number for Gov. Jay Nixon’s office before appearing, at one point, at a news conference with him. As oversight of nightly clashes between protesters and the police shifted from local to state officials, curfews came and went, and the National Guard was brought in to staff a police command post in his city, Mr. Knowles found himself being asked who was in charge.

“I got that question from people on the inside,” said Mr. Knowles, who is 35, white and in his second term as part-time mayor of this majority-black city of 21,000. “They’re like: ‘Where are our leaders? Who’s doing this?’ ”

“Somebody needs to own it,” Mr. Knowles, who has come in for his own share of criticism, said of the crisis that has enveloped Ferguson since the death of Michael Brown in the middle of a street on Aug. 9. “That’s the problem. Even on the government side, nobody’s owned it.” He added later, “Somebody needed to say, ‘I’m in charge.’ ”

The tangle of leadership, in both the white establishment and the black community, has not only contributed to the chaos — it has also raised questions about how effective both sides can be in bringing an end to the standoff and some lasting change on the complicated issues of race, trust and policing.

Mr. Nixon has offered shifting directions. Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, a black Missouri State Highway Patrol official to whom security was turned over after days of chaos, has repeatedly helped calm tensions, but the broader official response has sometimes been opaque and disjointed. State officials said they had not known of local officials’ plans to release a video of Mr. Brown appearing to push a clerk inside a convenience store shortly before the shooting. And the city’s handling of matters has been derided as tone deaf at times: A public relations firm with only white executives was called on to assist Ferguson, though Mr. Knowles said this week that a minority-run firm had also been employed.

Black clergy members and grass-roots leaders, too, have spoken from different platforms at different times. Civil rights organizations like the National Action Network and the N.A.A.C.P. are here, as are groups with more radical roots, like the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam.

As the days have gone on, the organizations appear to be forming coalitions with a more coordinated agenda, and on several occasions, black peacekeepers have been what calmed a contingent of violent forces within the sea of peaceful demonstrators, urging that bottles and rocks not be thrown.

“We never looked at it as something that we had to establish a leadership for right away,” said A. Akbar Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. “This is a war that came to our door. It was happening so rapidly and spontaneously that we didn’t have the time to do that.”

Mr. Nixon, a second-term Democrat who got high marks for his handling of a devastating tornado in Joplin in 2011 but has seemed less at ease in the crisis here, described the issues as extremely complex and defended his efforts. Aides say he is devoting every waking moment — including conference calls with police officials after 2 a.m. on many days — to a flood of conversations on the matter, as well as calls to the White House.

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Zaki BarutiCreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

“There’s no silver bullet that’s going to say that decades of challenges with race — decades of issues between police and, especially, young African-American kids — that that would somehow be solved by somebody standing up in front of a TV camera,” Mr. Nixon said in an interview. “So we have decided to really try to be out in the community to embrace and absorb the large diversity — whether it’s been in a church listening to leaders, whether it’s on conference calls with local electeds, whether it’s been at the operations center with the police leaders.”

In a region with a history of segregation and a majority-black population but a white power structure, other white leaders described intense efforts in recent days to reach out to community and grass-roots leaders. Yet some black leaders here said that they had rarely heard from white leaders and that many of their conversations were going on separately. If anything, Captain Johnson, who has walked the streets and met with protesters while overseeing the police operations, has been seen by some as a bridge between two worlds.

Not long after news of Mr. Brown’s death filtered out, ministers and local civil rights activists, including Zaki Baruti and Anthony Shahid, began organizing marches and called for the police officer involved to be publicly identified, fired and charged in the shooting. Antonio French, who is black and an alderman in St. Louis, swiftly became another face of the Ferguson protests, posting images and watching his Twitter following jump by more than 100,000 in less than two weeks. “Why am I the face of it?” Mr. French asked. “I was sitting there waiting for someone else to start defending that community.”

Quickly, national leaders, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton, arrived. Both mainstream civil rights groups and others with more radical roots tried to shape strategy.

Some black leaders say there has been coordination in what has sometimes seemed like a cacophony of voices.

“We have been in each other’s pockets,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said of the collaboration between civil rights groups. “When nightfall happens, we are all back and forth on the phone to each other.”

Still, there have been signs of jockeying for position. Mr. Baruti said the local activists had met privately with Mr. Sharpton last week to address their concerns of being overshadowed by national leaders. On Wednesday, as Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general, appeared here, some local activists complained that they had not been invited to meet with him, though they believed other black leaders had.

And Malik Zulu Shabazz, the president of Black Lawyers for Justice and the former national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, said some civil rights groups ought to have done more to keep the peace during late-night protests. On a recent night during a tense standoff, Mr. Shabazz urged protesters to stay back, as a group wearing “Peacekeeper” T-shirts locked arms and stood between the police and advancing protesters.

“A lot of groups and leaders are having press conferences and news conferences in the daytime, but the real labor in the daytime is to prepare for the nighttime,” Mr. Shabazz said.

One theme, often cited by black leaders as a way to have something positive result from the anger and pain here, is harnessing the energy in Ferguson to get people registered to vote. But a clear lesson from Ferguson so far has been that positive change can be long and slow, if it comes at all.

“What is troubling about Ferguson is the lack of representation about voting,” Barbara R. Arnwine, the president and executive director of the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Tuesday. “That has to change.”

Julie Bosman, John Eligon and Frances Robles contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Tangle of Leadership Helps Fuel Chaos in Ferguson. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe